{"id":220,"date":"2007-01-29T01:36:00","date_gmt":"2007-01-29T05:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/?p=220"},"modified":"2007-01-29T01:36:00","modified_gmt":"2007-01-29T05:36:00","slug":"god-vs-the-flying-spaghetti-monster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/2007\/01\/god-vs-the-flying-spaghetti-monster\/","title":{"rendered":"God vs. the Flying Spaghetti Monster"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s an interesting post over at Bill Vallicella’s blog<\/a> on whether belief in God is in the same rational boat as belief that there is a tiny china teapot orbiting the sun, an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon, or the flying spaghetti monster<\/a>. Bill says no, and I agree.<\/p>\n

He notes a number of salient points of difference. The most important is simply that there are lots of principled, positive arguments for God’s existence grounded in very general features of reality (for a sampling, see here<\/a>), whereas there are no such arguments for lunar unicorns, flying spaghetti monsters, and such. Moreover, many theistic arguments have had defenders from among the brightest minds who have ever lived (e.g., Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, etc.). To my knowledge, no one<\/span> – or at least no one of recognized intelligence, erudition, and sanity – takes belief in celestial teapots, lunar unicorns, or flying spaghetti monsters seriously.<\/p>\n

Another relevant issue here is the burden of proof. Bertrand Russell seems to think that belief in God is just as unsubstantiated, and therefore just as irrational, as belief in a celestial teapot. But, as the preceding paragraph (and Bill’s post) shows, the two cases are not at all on par with each other. Here’s what I wrote in reply to Bill:<\/p>\n

Every claim faces a burden of proof in that it is always fair to challenge the claim by asking for its grounds or justification. That said, … it seems to me that the extent of this burden can be modified by at least three factors:
<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Prima facie plausibility. All other things being equal, one who makes a claim having less prima facie plausibility has a greater burden of proof than one who makes a claim that has greater prima facie plausibility. <\/span><\/li>\n
  2. High stakes. All other things being equal, the more deleterious the consequences of a claim’s being false, the greater the burden of proof on the one making the claim…. <\/span><\/li>\n
  3. Conventional stipulation: In some contexts (e.g., a formal debate, or a criminal trial) there is a conventional burden of proof that each of the participants implicitly accepts. <\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Assessments of (1) and (2) … exhibit a degree of audience-relativity. Thus, an atheist like Russell may judge that the idea of God is so antecedently implausible that, given the inconclusiveness of the standard arguments for God’s existence, the theist has failed to meet his burden of proof and thus has failed to establish his rational bona fides in believing in God. A theist or an agnostic, however, may find the traditional theistic arguments more than adequate to establish the rationality of theism because they don’t judge theism to have such a high prima facie implausibility.<\/p>\n

    Granting all that, however, … Russell fails to appreciate the fact that principled arguments can be given for theism and that, even if all of those arguments prove unconvincing, that’s still a lot more than can be said for invisible unicorns and such.<\/span> <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    There’s an interesting post over at Bill Vallicella’s blog on whether belief in God is in the same rational boat as belief that there is a tiny china teapot orbiting the sun, an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon, or the flying spaghetti monster. Bill says no, and I agree. He notes\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}